Every venue that sells online businesses publishes a fee, and almost none of them publishes the bill. The real cost of selling a store is the success fee plus the listing fees, the upgrades, the escrow, the holdback delay, and the weeks of your own time the process consumes. This guide lays out all of it, venue type by venue type, so you can compare the thing that matters: what a completed sale actually costs at your store's size.
The headline number: success fees
Success fees across the market run from roughly 5 to 15 percent of the sale price. The spread is not noise; it prices how much work the venue does for you.
At the top sit curated brokerages. Empire Flippers' published commission structure takes 15 percent on deals up to 700,000 dollars, with a flat 10,000 dollar minimum on the smallest sales, stepping down in tiers above that line. Traditional brokers' own fee explainers commonly quote 8 to 12 percent for smaller companies. For that you get vetting, buyer management, negotiation support, and a hand through closing.
In the middle sit open marketplaces. Flippa charges a 10 percent success fee on top of its listing packages. You get reach, and most of the deal work stays yours.
At the bottom sit self-serve models. Kairos's self-serve lane charges a 5 percent success fee, only when the deal closes, with listing and verification free; the exact schedule, including the full-service option on larger deals, lives on the pricing page. The model works because verification and escrow are automated into the platform rather than billed as broker hours, and what listing involves is public before you commit to anything.
A fuller breakdown of what brokers charge, venue by venue with their published numbers, has its own answer page. The short version stands: the spread prices the work, and the work you need depends on the store.
One fee-model distinction matters more than any single rate: whether the venue earns only when you do. A success-fee-only venue is paid at your closing. A venue that charges up front is paid at your listing, sold or not.
The fees around the fee
Listing fees. Open marketplaces charge to list: Flippa's packages run from 29 to 699 dollars depending on price tier, non-refundable, and paid again on relisting. Small numbers, but they are pure cost on a store that does not sell, and they price in the venue's incentive: the marketplace makes money on listings, not just on sales.
Paid upgrades. Promoted placement, premium packages, NDA add-ons. Each is optional, each is easy to justify mid-listing, and together they can double the cost of an open-marketplace sale that drags.
Escrow. The transaction itself costs a small percentage that shrinks with deal size. Convention on self-serve deals splits it between buyer and seller; whatever you agree goes in writing before funding. Never treat escrow as a cost to avoid. It is the cheapest insurance in the entire deal.
Buyer-side friction. Some venues charge buyers subscriptions to see full listings or contact sellers. You do not pay that fee, but you feel it: it shrinks and filters your buyer pool, for better and worse. Ask any venue who can actually see your listing and what they had to pay for the privilege.
The costs without invoices
Your preparation time. Reconciling ad accounts, cleaning twelve months of books, documenting processes, answering diligence questions. Weeks of owner time, and the single best-paid work you will do, because preparation converts directly into price and speed. The selling walkthrough in this series covers the process end to end; the point here is to budget the hours honestly.
The holdback delay. When a deal includes a holdback, commonly 10 to 25 percent for a year or two when used at all, that money is yours but not yet in your account. It is a timing cost, and it shrinks with proof: verified numbers leave less uncertainty to insure, so both the holdback's size and its length come down.
The unverified-numbers discount. The most expensive cost on this page never appears as a line item. Numbers a buyer cannot check invite discounts, stalled diligence, and offers that die late. The same store earns a better multiple the moment its revenue is provable from order data. Whatever venue you choose, making your numbers checkable is the highest-return spend in the entire process.
The rates nobody publishes
Some traditional brokerages run fee explainers that quote industry ranges without ever stating their own commission; the real number shows up later, in a private proposal. Nothing scandalous about that, but it is useful to know: ask for the rate in writing before you sign an engagement letter, along with what it covers, what exclusivity it demands, and what happens if you find your own buyer during the term. A broker worth their fee answers all four without flinching.
Comparing venues honestly
Run the arithmetic at your store's actual size, because the rankings flip with scale. On a 40,000 euro store, a flat five-figure broker minimum is a third of the price, an open marketplace costs the listing fee plus 10 percent, and a 5 percent self-serve fee is 2,000 euros. On an 800,000 euro store, tiered broker structures compress, full-service hand-holding starts earning its keep, and the choice becomes about service, not just rate.
To run that arithmetic you need the price itself, which means starting from an honest valuation rather than a hopeful one. Work out what the store is worth with the free calculator and the valuation guide in this series before comparing what anyone would charge to sell it, because every fee on this page is a percentage of a number you have not confirmed yet. A venue comparison built on an inflated valuation optimizes the fee on a sale that will not happen.
Then weigh what each fee buys against what your store needs. Clean, provable numbers need less selling; a complex story needs more. The fee is only ever the price of the work. The mistake is paying full-service prices for work you did not need, or skipping the work your deal genuinely required.
One last framing that keeps the whole page in proportion: the cheapest sale is rarely the one with the lowest fee. It is the one where the price held. A seller who saves two percent in fees and gives up ten percent in diligence discounts, because the numbers could not be proven, paid the most expensive fee on this page without ever seeing an invoice for it.